Reddit Creepsplosion, Part Eleventy Billion and Two [UPDATED]

There’s drama on Reddit again, with a veritable army of Redditors rising up in righteous indignation to fight off those evil man-haters who’ve challenged their ineffable right to free speech to post creepy and intrusive and possibly illegal pictures of women and girls.

I don’t have the energy to catalogue the whole murky mess so let me just point out a few of the key events here, all of which have inspired multiple mega-threads full of sound and fury and lots of misinformation.

1) Reddit user Violentacrez, the founder of r/jailbait and r/picsofdeadkids and countless other skeezy subreddits, deleted his account after learning that Adrian Chen of Gawker was working on a story about him that might include his real name.

On Reddit, where bullshit travels at the speed of light, Redditors convinced themselves that Violentacrez, who took pride in being Reddit’s “creepy uncle,” was being “blackmailed” by either Chen or ShitRedditSays, conceptualized by most Redditors as some sort of collective supervillain not unlike Star Trek’s Borg. (On the Men’s Rights subreddit, moderator Ignatiusloyola, a major purveyor of misinformation on the current controversies, even suggested that I might somehow be mixed up in all of this, which is of course not the case. ) Violentacrez has come forth to say that Chen was not in fact blackmailing him in any way.

Naturally, Redditors have risen up to defend the honor of Mr. Acrez, who despite because of his incredible skeeziness was a beloved figure amongst the Reddit masses. Indeed, the moderators of a number of popular subreddits – including r/politics and, of course, r/mensrights – have banded together to ban Gawker and Jezebel and all related sites from their alleged free-speech zones.

A few links if you want to explore this further:

Redditors Stand Up to Gawker to Protect Child Pornography (AtlanticWire)

[Mod Post] A tribute to Violentacrez, who was doxxed and was being threatened in real life, and an important message to ALL subscribers (please upvote this self post) (NSFW subreddit thread; unreliable information within)

2) The CreepShots subreddit, devoted to surreptitiously taken pictures of attractive young women (and possibly a few men), has vanished, apparently either banned by Reddit’s admins or taken down by the subreddit’s moderator after someone threatened to expose his name.

But this was not the only attempt to creep-shame the creepshotters:  A tumblr blog called Predditors posted the personal information of 20 or so Redditors who were active posters in r/creephots; all the info was gleaned from other Reddit postings of theirs. (Most of this information has since been scrubbed from the site.)

Naturally all this has inspired much indignation amongst Redditors, who are seemingly unaware of the irony inherent in their indignation about the invasion of privacy of those who ran and/or enthusiastically participated in a subreddit explicitly devoted to photographic invasions of privacy. (I don’t support revealing the personal info of these people, but at the same time I’m having a little trouble working up any sympathy for them.)

Rumors have spread on Reddit that one Redditor was physically attacked after being exposed as a CreepShot regular, but the only source of information on this is a user with the Reddit handle of POTATO_IN_MY_ANUS, so let’s just say that this is unconfirmed for now.

Links:

How to Shut Down Reddit’s CreepShots Once and for All: Name Names (Jezebel)

Internet Wars Over Women’s Bodies (Forbes)

The Internet War Over Creeps on Reddit (AtlanticWire)

/r/creepshots mod blackmailed into shutting down the sub a.k.a. The Admins Sure Doxxed The Ball On This One (ShitRedditSays thread)

r/creepshots has been removed due to doxxing of the main mod (SubredditDrama thread)

So it begins. Creepshots member beaten up following the Jezebel article which doxxed 20 Redditors (SubredditDrama thread)

There are naturally many more threads on the various aspects of all this on SubredditDrama right now.

Naturally, the good people of Men’s Rights have some thoughts on all this, many of them based on things that aren’t true.

/r/Creepshots and /r/violentacrez taken over by SRS by blackmailing with doxxing info. Apparently r/MensRights is next. (NOTE from DF: Nothing in this headline is true.)

Update on ViolentAcrez/Gawker/Adrian Chen/CreepShots (Substantially more accurate than the previous thread.)

Why does SRS feel the need to fuck with everyone? (Assorted SRS vilification based mostly on misinformation.)

Can the recent doxxing events be seen as an act of terrorism against this (or any) subreddit?

I’ll update this post with more info as necessary.

EDITED TO ADD: Here’s a giant list of links to media coverage of all this.

EDITED AGAIN: Chen’s article has been published on Gawker.

Meanwhile, the now-infamous Redditor POTATO_IN_MY_ANUS, the source of much of the dubious information discussed above, has been banned from Reddit; more importantly, he has been caught doctoring a screenshot of a conversation between him and a Reddit admin explaining why he’s being banned. So pretty much all of his claims, including the one about a creepshotter getting beaten up, are now suspect.

Also, here’s a screenshot that purports to be from Violentacrez explaining why he left Reddit.